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“We monitor student athletes for heat exhaustion. During a typical 100°F practice, the Zephyr™ system alerted me to one student’s rising core temperature - before he showed physical signs of illness. We were able to immediately cool and hydrate him for a full recovery,” says Daniel K. Bellamy, Director of Sports Performance Howard University Bison Athletics. Professional Sports is a huge industry and is estimated to be $1.3 trillion in the US alone. The industry bridges many different activities, ranging from fan merchandise sold outside sports events to multimillion-dollar acquisition of superstars by the biggest clubs. The sports industry have a multitude of varying stakeholders from media sponsors, sports agencies and broadcasters, to right owners such as athletes, clubs, leagues and federations. However, spending varies with the type of sports, for example, association football (Soccer) gets 43% of the global share, American football gets 13%, baseball gets 12%, Formula 1 gets 7% and basketball gets 6%. As spending in the overall sports industry is growing faster than ever, stake holders such as clubs, coaches, and athletes are increasingly investing in technology to win the biggest piece of the pie. Wether it is a team or an individual sports, athletes and their coaches are increasingly using smart wearables to track athlete performance both during athlete selection and training. This helps the coaches to reduce guess work, and support their decision making using real data. This in turn further help the sports clubs predict outcomes and minimize risk. In the rest of the article, we are going to discuss fivewearable devices companies that are tracking athlete performance across a variety of sports including soccer, American football, rugby, basketball, baseball, and racing.

Jim Merritt wears a Catapult monitoring system compression vest while taking a warm-up jump shot before a basketball game Friday, March 3, 2017, in Cambridge, Mass. Athlete trackers are being used by hundreds of teams in dozens of sports helping coaches plan their practices, make substitutions in games and decide when a player is ready to return from an injury by accumulating biometric and positioning data collected from the trackers. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia)ASSOCIATED PRESS

Zephyr™’s wearable platform consists of a compression shirt (or a sports bra), that can hoist a GPS and a biomodule. Zephyr™’s biomodule can directly measure six key inputs including heart rate, breathing rate, heart rate variability, posture and impact. This is then used to deduce more than 20 secondary parameters such as jump height and flight time, explosiveness, peak force, heart rate confidence, estimated core body temperature, percent of heart rate at anaerobic threshold, heart rate recovery, physiological load, physiological intensity, etc. The results can be visualized in Zephyr™’s OmniSense™ PC as well as cloud-based software application, that can track up to 100 individuals in near real-time. OmniSense™ can be customized to provide safety alert when an individual crossed a safety threshold, or to track an individual’s training zone relative to the assigned workout routine. Zephyr™ is used by athletes at the Indiana University athletic training facility, Indiana University’s American football team, George Souther University’s soccer team, Major League Baseball teams such as Pirates and basketball team such as Maryland Terrapins.

ADVANCE FOR WEEKEND, AUG. 21-23 - In this Aug. 5, 2015, photo, Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver Jeremy Maclin wears a StatSports GPS training shirt as he participates in a drill during NFL football training camp in St. Joseph, Mo. In a league with few secrets, and seemingly fewer ways to get a leg up on the competition, the Chiefs are among a trio of team--the Panthers and Bengals are the others--giving the high-tech system a chance. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)ASSOCIATED PRESS

StatSport’s Apex Pro and Apex Athlete series are a pod and vest system that can track the position of the players in real-time, as well as derive secondary quantities such as total distance, speed, high metabolic load distance, accelerations, fatigue index, dynamic stress load, step balance and collisions. Also the data can be visualized using StatSport’s Apex Software system on a Desktop, Phone or an iPad. StatSport’s system is used by Soccer clubs (Manchester City FC, Arsenal FC, Liverpool FC, England Football Association Men's U20, and Wales Football Association), Football clubs (New York City FC, US Soccer Women’s National Team, Portland Thorns FC), Rugby clubs (Canada Rugby, Ulster Rugby and Irish Rugby League Men’s Team), Basketball clubs (Croatia Basketball), Hockey clubs (Irish Hockey and Belgian Hockey Men’s National Team) and Athletics clubs (Athletes’ Consulting).

Catapult sports have multiple GPS modules like ClearSky T6, OptimEye S5, OptimEye X4, GPSports EVO, PLAYERTEK+ that are priced based on their range. The data can be viewed by Catapult AMS software which is designed to optimize an athlete’s performance while minimizing risk. Catapult sports is currently supporting 35 sports across 1,800 teams, which includes Dallas Mavericks, Saracens, West Bromwich Albion, Buffalo Bills, AZ Almaar, Hull City, Jacksonville Jaguars and Newcastle United.

Firstbeat’s textile heart-rate belt, plastic heart-rate belt and team receiver use a chest strap based system to track user’s heart rate and heart rate variability. Firstbeat uses these primary biometric parameters to derive detailed information about the athlete’s training loads, performance readiness, fitness testing, sleep quality and lifestyle. Firstbeat’s platform is used by over 22,000 athletes representing over 1000 teams around the world. This includes Soccer (Arsenal Fulham, Manchester City and Manchester United), Ice Hockey (Buffalo Sabres, Detroit Red Wings and Arizona Coyotes), Basketball (Golden State Warriors, Chicago Bulls and Orlando Magic), Lacrosse (Coastal Carolina University, George Mason University and Boston University) and Rowing (University of Washington, Princeton University and Stanford University).

Exelio's Gpexe® system also has a variety of wearable devices that includes Gpexe® Pro² that can track location using a GPS as well as motion using built-in accelerometers which can be viewed using a web application. One of In the Gpexe® system key differentiator it's ability to compute metabolic power, that takes into account the speed as well as the athlete’s acceleration.

These companies have built the first generation of wearable performance monitoring platforms, that can give professional athletes some exciting insights from either GPS based location tracking or single lead ECG based biometric monitoring. Future generations of wearables will combine these features with additional movement and biometric trackings such as blood oxygen saturation and bioimpedance, to give an even better prediction about performance outcomes. This will help us to see a new generation of athletes who will continue to over-perform and therefore help clubs and coaches to keep pushing the boundaries of their sports.

I am a CEO and co-founder of a leading AI-powered medical device startup. I have raised VC investments in US and EU, won multiple awards (Luminate in Rochester NY, Irish Laboratory Award 2018-19, Irish SME Business Awards 2018, Top 20 health and Medtech startup by Silicon r...